Examples

Without this openness to further questions, these answers, whether scientific findings, reports on slices of reality, or certitudes about how things work, may over time crystallize, become opaque, and begin to function as obstacles, blocking further inquiry into the essence of ever-evolving change in the now.

America, he goes on to say, is currently awash in an unpleasant surplus of clanging, clashing certitudes, and that is why there is such a level of a rhetorical bitterness disproportionate to our real differences.

Culled from notebooks McCarthy said he kept during that year, Odd Man Out is a memoir, a nonfiction book that isn't a slave to the certitudes of journalism, but rather is beholden to the author's overriding, unflinching honesty to their subject.

We return with him to Europe and observe his downward spiral as he persists in obstinately questioning the certitudes in which his teachers would seem to have him believe -- along with the upward spiral that brings him to a mature, less dependent sense of self and a release, not only from his monastic vows, but from the intellectual torment of doubt.